
Local / National / International is the first of a new programming series at Lowry, conceived by curator Zoe Watson. The format aims to showcase Northern artists alongside artists from further afield who’ve never shown in Salford before. By presenting the artists side-by-side, it allows us to look at the similarities and differences in their practices.
This iteration brings together a trio of solo exhibitions by three female ceramicists: Aliyah Hussain (local), Paloma Proudfoot (national) and Renee So (international), displayed in three distinct, equally sized rooms. Linked by the medium of ceramics, the show asks us to consider how three differing locations and perspectives shape the work being made. For each, their work serves as a medium for storytelling, blending history, fiction and feminist ideas. But the overlap is not overt – the artists present works in very different styles, so each remains an exhibition of its own.
We start local in the room directly opposite the entrance. For She was waiting for her roots, Hussain presents ornate ceramic sculptures that wrap around the room like broken-off vines, deviant odds and ends of bulbs, fronds and tendrils, fractured and splayed onto soil-brown walls. On closer inspection, the sculptures resemble detailed brooches and decorative gilding, but also strange tentacles, corals, and, in places, even hands with pink, brown and turquoise glazing.
There is also a jaggedness to the shapes and arrangements – something sharp and abrasive. Hussain took influence from Anne Richter’s 1967 science-fiction novel, The Sleep of Plants, in which the female protagonist rejects her fate and wills herself to turn into a plant. Which according to the gallery handout, is a story of ‘horror, transformation and feminist refusal’, since in order to transform, the protagonist must undergo suffering, restlessness and unease. This seems to be expressed through the spiky shapes and hardness of her sculptural forms, a sense of materials compressed and forced into something against the natural order.
On the opening night, Hussain describes her practice ‘as a drawing’, which I interpret as something incomplete and evolving. It makes sense that she presents an immersive environment – not individual objects, but continuous pieces that can be dissembled and reconfigured. There are more layers to this too – the feeling of liveness in her plant-natured ideas are borne out further through the ambient soundscape accompanying her exhibition, which was made by contact microphones being placed directly onto clay sculptures. Comprised of humming, shifting, reverberating sounds and chimes, the effect is boggy and meditative. You get a feeling of roots growing through soil, the melding and moulding of earthy materials. It evokes both the medium she is working with and traces the plot of Richter’s novel. Standing inside the room, I get a feeling of time slowed down, a rejection of the pace of modern life, metamorphosed through the necessarily slow act of shaping and firing the clay.

Next, we move to the right-hand room into Lay Figure, presented by London-based artist Paloma Proudfoot, whose lurid, clinical tone jars against the dark, sleepy, undergroundness of the room next door. I’m confronted and unsettled by a series of complex ceramic friezes and sculptures, whose technique is informed by the artist’s background in clothes pattern-making, depicting bodies (and parts) in strange and somewhat surreal arrangements.
In the corner hangs ‘Lay Figure’ (2024), a ceramic bust with mannequin-like arms and a zip running down its midline. Partially unzipped from the top, and from the back, it is opened to reveal its anatomical insides. On another wall, large tableaus such as ‘A casting from life & Skin Poem (II)’ (2024) feature two aproned workers peeling off the skin of another’s leg, evoking some sort of bizarre art project-come-science experiment. It feels tender and nurturing even as it renders the body lifeless and detached from the patient.
For her exhibition, Proudfoot draws on research into the gendered history of medicine. Particularly at the Salpêtrière Hospital in 19th century Paris, which was at that time a forward-thinking centre for the study of women with hysteria. Practices involved doctors using tuning forks – a motif throughout Proudfoot’s work – plaster-casting and photography, to both induce and record states and seizures in patients. Such methods meant that what was captured was essentially a re-enactment; a choreographing of women’s bodies to demonstrate their own hypotheses. This feels so clearly articulated across Proudfoot’s works. Bodies are arranged into postures like puppets and treated with crude instruments of diagnosis, such that we see the methods of the Salpêtrière Hospital as a kind of theatre.
Rather than recreating archival images from her research, Proudfoot reimagines scenes predominantly using models who identify as female and non-binary. She transports the narrative onto people whose identities can be seen as marginalised today and viewed as sites of resistance.

Two performances also bookend the exhibition at its opening and closing, which have been made in collaboration with artist and choreographer Aniela Piasecka, and composer Ailie Ormston. The dancer moves slowly, sequentially through postures of pleading, crumbling, yielding; trying to fit into patterns. All the while, her eyes are fixed on something or someone and a kind of lag exists between what the mind is registering and the movements. It expresses fragility, detachment, dictation – interacting closely with the ideas in the artworks.
Finally, to the left of the gallery we find The Essence, and encounter Renee So’s oversized perfume bottles and sculptural works displayed around the room on two clean white ledges. Playful and fleshy in form, they take inspiration from the predecessor of perfume – snuff bottles – which originated in Qing dynasty China. Snuff was introduced to China by European traders and eventually became a status symbol for the upper classes. Many of these ornate miniatures are housed in the collections of contemporary Western museums.
So presents a combination of her own snuff bottle designs, alongside explicit copies of modern-day designer fragrances, like ‘Colony’ by Jean Patou and Yves Saint Laurent’s ‘Opium’. By tracing the design cues from colonial trade to present day consumables, So draws attention to narratives concealed by these decorative collectables, as well as lasting processes of Orientalism.
In a separate room, the artist presents a single cultural artefact, the ‘magic mirror’. This is an optical phenomenon procured from a fifth-generation craftsman in Japan, that projects an image of women playing an ancient Chinese ball game, cuju. Initially, this felt a little random alongside the rest of the exhibition. But then I learnt that cuju predates football. Once again, So elevates forgotten histories and forms of Western appropriation through her choice of objects.
With this show Lowry brings together three accomplished solo exhibitions that make gentle connections of feminist ideas of resistance to suppression. I enjoyed each as standalone exhibitions and was left feeling the innate qualities of working with clay lends itself to the narratives being explored. In the shaping, sculpting, and casting of something, it’s as if the material itself mirrors the way stories are being told.
Local / National / International, Lowry, Salford, 23 November 2024 – 16 February 2025.
Natalie Russett is a writer based in Manchester.
This review is supported by Lowry.
Published 20.12.2024 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews
1,216 words